How to report technical issues

It’s not working, what should I do?

If, like me, you get a lot of “it’s not working, what should I do?” as feedback, then you’ll understand the need for this article.

Also, if you find yourself getting frustrated with, or feel frustration coming from a person who’s supposed to be helping you fix a technical issue, then this article might just be for you.

Hi, how may I help you?

Give details

First, you should understand that your technician needs all the information they can get to solve your problem. This means that everything you can remember that could have led to the problem is relevant, and you should provide them when reporting the problem.

Examples are:

• What you were doing, or the last thing you remember doing
• When you were doing it. (Date/Time issues can be hard to spot)
• What you have tried
• For a web page, provide a URL
• For a multi-user system, give the user account and role
• For a program you wrote, give the stack trace, or relevant logged errors

Hey Technician, here’s the details of the bug

Take Screenshots / Record Videos

If Pictures are worth a thousand words, and Videos are worth a lot, lot more, providing relevant media, showing what you’re experiencing, will save you the stress of explaining with words.

This is useful, not just with software issues, but hardware as well.

Taking a video of your car, that depicts the strange noise the engine makes works a lot better than explaining to your mechanic.

Be careful with screenshots and videos though, so you don’t give our sensitive information.

Look, my browser speaks to me in a strange tongue

Give tool specifics

If the issue is physical on a machine such as a printer or car engine, be sure to provide the Manufacturer and Model details.

If it’s a software tool, then provide name and version of the software, as well as the relevant physical parameters of the machine the software runs on, such as screen-size, refresh rate, and DPI for display issues.

You asked for specs, right?

Provide simple steps to reproduce the issue

• If you can retrace your steps, do so, to make sure you understand issue.
• Use bullet points when writing these steps, so it can be followed easily.

Not like this, please

Remove unnecessary steps

This means doing some research on your own. It’s important that the steps are simple, because complicated steps leave room for error, such that it becomes possible for the issue to only occur sometimes.

… and there’s nothing worse than an issue that only shows up sometimes.

Help out

Even after you get a technician working on your problem, be available to answer questions and give insight to how you used the system.